How are the fields of mathematics and academic research different today compared to years past? In this week’s podcast, Robert J. Marks and Gregory Chaitin discuss the challenges many mathematicians face today and the unfortunate trend toward bureaucracy that makes academic research difficult. Dropping names of mathematical geniuses past and present, they explore how technology and artificial intelligence are changing the world.

Show Notes

• 00:23 | Introducing Gregory Chaitin
• 00:39 | Is math discovered or invented?
• 02:49 | The pressure to publish papers
• 08:31 | A human-computer symbiosis?
• 13:22 | Computer software proofing mathematics
• 19:45 | Bureaucratic obstacles to genuine research

Additional Resources

• The Chaitin Interview Part I
• The Chaitin Interview Part II
• Gregory Chaitin’s Website
• Unravelling Complexity: The Life and Work of Gregory Chaitin, edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Francisco Antonio Doria
• Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical by Gregory Chaitin
• Henri Poincaré, 19th century French mathematician
• Georg Cantor, German mathematician
• A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy
• Claude Shannon, mathematician, “the father of information theory”
• Lofti Zadeh, world-renowned computer scientist
• Andrew Wiles, English mathematician
• Karl Popper, Austrian-British philosopher
• William Sealy Gosset, statistician and chemist
• Elon Musk, engineer and entrepreneur
• Neuralink
• Kurt Gödel, Austrian-born mathematician
• Alan Turing, mathematician and philosopher
• Stephen Wolfram, computer scientist and physicist
• WolframAlpha
• Mathematica
• Leonard Euler, Swiss mathematician and physicist
• Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician and physicist
• Srinivasa Ramanujan, Indian mathematician